Should new Mac and PC buyers spend the extra money for that lucky number seven?

Apple unleashed a pile of new Mac hardware on its users Tuesday: new 13" Retina MacBook Pros and Mac Minis using Intel's newest Ivy Bridge processors are available for shipping now, while substantially redesigned iMacs begin shipping in November and December. If you like to upgrade when things are new, now is the time to strike.

Any new computer is an investment, though, and you'll want to make sure that what you're buying will last for as long as possible. For each of the new Macs Apple began selling yesterday, the company offers a $200 upgrade option that will turn your Core i5 processor into a Core i7 processor (and while it hasn't started selling the new iMacs yet, those computers should have a similar upgrade path). If you're in the market for a new Mac (or any computer, really), do these CPU upgrades give you a good bang for your upgrade buck?

What's in a number? Well, it depends...

So what's the difference between a Core i5 and a Core i7? Well, thanks to Intel, the answer isn't simple.

The iMacs use desktop-class processors rather than the mobile processors used by the MacBook Pros and Mac Minis, which makes things a bit easier: a Core i7 upgrade will get you more processor cache, more clock speed, and Hyper-threading. There is no Core i5 desktop processor with Hyper-threading and there is only one seldom-seen Core i5 desktop chip with only two cores (the low power i5-3470T), which draws a mostly clear line between the Core i5 and Core i7 product lines—on the desktop, dual-core CPUs are a market segment left to the Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron chips. There are some oddities and variations within these product families, but in general it's easy enough figure out what's what.

It would be all too easy if Intel's mobile lineup followed the same rules as the desktop chips, but they don't: Mobile Core i5 processors are all dual-core parts with Hyper-threading, rather than quad-core parts. Mobile Core i7 processors can be quad-core chips—as they are in the $799 Mac Mini—but they can also be dual-core CPUs with Hyper-threading enabled, making them much less of an upgrade over their mobile Core i5 counterparts. These dual-core i5 and i7 chips also share other marquee features—the most important is probably Turbo Boost, which can greatly increase the speed of processor cores if your computer isn't using all of them at once. Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron processors in both desktops and laptops lack this feature, but all of the i5s and i7s have it.

Since the processors used by the new 13" Retina MacBook Pros are all dual-core chips, when you spend the $200 to upgrade to an i7 CPU, all you're really getting is a little extra clock speed and a little extra cache, which makes much less of a performance difference than the upgraded Mini's two extra cores.

Do you need to spend the cash?

The answer to that question varies depending on what kind of Core i7 processor we're talking about. If you're jumping from two cores to four (as you do in the Mac Mini), you'll probably be happy if you spend the cash. Apple doesn't list Intel's CPU model numbers, but if you're buying from another manufacturer you can usually tell the difference by seeing whether the processor has a Q (for quad-core) in its name (i.e., the Core i7-3610QM). If you're simply getting a slight clock-speed bump and maybe Hyper-threading out of the deal, as is the case in the new iMacs and the 13" Retina MacBook Pro, your money is going to be best spent elsewhere unless you regularly do very CPU-heavy tasks like video editing and transcoding or very heavy Photoshop work, and the minutes and seconds you'll save with a marginally faster CPU are important to you.

For most general-use workloads—browsing the Web, word processing, checking e-mail, infrequent or light Photoshop or Premiere usage, and even gaming—most applications simply don't use more power than is afforded by a modern Ivy Bridge CPU most of the time, especially if we're talking about the quad-core models already shipping with every iMac. Most of the time, that $200 CPU you bought is going to be sitting idle, something that can be done just as capably by slower, cheaper chips.

I consider myself a reasonably heavy computer user, and this is what my quad-core processor spends most of its time doing.

If you're looking to upgrade either of those Macs (or any other PC), your money is better spent elsewhere: spending $300 will get you a 256GB SSD in the new MacBook Pro, taking the amount of available space from tight-but-workable to just plain workable (depending on the amount of data you need to store locally, of course). In the new iMacs, the 21" models now come with slow-spinning 5400RPM mechanical hard drives, which is actually a downgrade from the 7200RPM desktop hard drives in the 2011 models—there, your upgrade cash would be better spent on a performance-enhancing SSD or Fusion Drive. Things are even better on the PC side, where prices for SSDs have fallen under a dollar per gigabyte and clearance sales can get you nice, fast, high-capacity drives for even less.

It's not that CPU upgrades are totally without merit, or that there aren't people who would benefit from upgrades to either of these new Macs. However, if your upgrade money is limited, CPU upgrades simply don't provide the best bang for your buck.

Promoted Comments

I had no idea that the i5 vs i7 thing was quite this confusing. The genius that came up with this naming scheme at Intel must have a PhD in marketing

Actually they probably do. Your mistake is in thinking that Intel expect the majority of people to buy the i7! The point of the i7 being there is to give people who have more money something to buy, and to help regular folk buy the i5 because it looks like such a good deal compared to the i7. (See price anchoring for the psychology behind all this.)

The apocryphal story is about how Wendy's noticed their triple burgers weren't selling well, so they removed them from the menu. The net result was the number of doubles sold went down. This is because people generally don't want to buy the cheapest (singles) and fell like the most expensive is profligate (not good value for money) so something in between works well.

The general best practise is to have a range of 3 items which is exactly what Intel has done. Also note how you were comparing the i5 to the i7 and not to something else, so Intel gets to frame the values.

Cache is extremely important. The Celerons of old had none, and they were unbelievably slower than equivalent CPUs with cache.

That was 15 years ago, these days it's not as big of a deal to go from 6MB to 8MB cache.

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Hyperthreading is kind of glossed over in the article, but it literally doubles the threads available. It won't be as big a boost as doubling the cores, but it is still significant.

It doubles the threads, but not the number that can actually be processed. Mostly it just prevents a CPU core from being idle until the OS scheduler can assign it a new thread. The real-world performance boost varied widely and is only about 5-20%.

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RAID0 (or RAID5) can go a long way to improving HDD speed. I couldn't justify the 10x in price to get 1/2 the storage and 20x the performance of SSD when I could buy several HDDs and run them in RAID0 for a fraction of the cost with huge capacities and a marginal difference in performance.

Not really. On top of significantly higher transfer speeds there are things like latency that an SSD simply makes go away. Not to mention RAID 0 is never a good idea for any use case.

437 posts | registered Mar 12, 2010

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

158 Reader Comments

Not sure what some of negative commenters were really looking for here. I took it as a synopsis of the variations in Intel's CPU features to aid BTO choices -- within an Apple-focused context because of the recent product announcements. It seems to meet that intent just fine.

I can attest to this being a nightmare for consumers. I bought a 2012 13" MBA and was very pleasantly surprised to find 4 threads and HT-enabled (i5 3217U) part. I was expecting a dual-core processor.To check any previously available macs check the URLs below. They haven't been updated with the new macs yet, but if you look at the details of the old ones you can find a lot of other details that are not immediately obvious from Apple's site.

Without air conditioning, this thing sounds like a leaf blower in the summer. Even at mildly warm room temperature, the fan is permanently on turbo. I tried to get it replaced under apple care but apparently leaf blower sounds are normal.

In the end, I definitely would have preferred an i5 over the constant noise of the i7. Or at least I'm assuming the i5 runs cooler.

A far better upgrade would have been SSD. Speed without the heat (noise).

Right now, with Ivy Bridge, we have "3rd generation Core i7/5/3" processors. So the meaning of "Core i7" shifts over time... back in the day of Pentium I, II, III, etc., at least names changed with each generation. Same with Xeons... Xeon E3-1280v2 - is an Ivy Bridge, reusing a number from Sandy Bridge with a "v2" tacked on. So there, Ivy is "second version" instead of "third generation" on the desktop.

I always go for the code names to understand what something REALLY is. http://ark.intel.com/ is your friend, always (except for unreleased hardware).

God article. Yea, I still use a C2Q as my main PC processor, even for gaming, most of my ripping, and video editing. Rarely do I hit the processor hard unless I't got some VMs open. an i5 dual is well on it;s way to being all most people wil ever need. Some pros and enthusiasts may find occasions they need more, but is waiting a couple extra minutes for a render pass worth it vs the universal performance improvement of some other upgrade, you HAVE to considder that.

That said, a great point was made about the AES encryption microcode in the i7 not present in the if, that could be worth it easy for people who encrypt, but I'de have to see who FileVault 2 actually works annd what load it's actually adding, i believe it's very minimal and though a selling point, it may not actually be an issue.

On the desktop, so long as I've got a quad core (I use VMs regularly, 2 cores is not enough), I would instantly choose the Fusion option over the processor upgrade. Also, upgrading to 16GB RAM if it left 2 slots open, I'd probably do that as well before popping for a faster CPU. the GPU, nah, if I can stretch 18+ months with what it has, Thunderbolt brings the upgradibility I'd need for the future. If I had to buy one now (though I'd run Windows native on it 90% of the time), it would be the top 27" iMac, with the 3.2 i5 quad, 16GB RAM, the 675GPU (the 660 w/ half the ram is not really enough for me, this is the only reason I'm bumping to the higher model), and the fusion drive 1GB (I'll add cheaper bulk storage myself externally vs popping for the 3TB intnerla).

In the new iMacs, the 21" models now come with slow-spinning 5400RPM mechanical hard drives...

I dare someone - anyone - to justify that with a straight face.

/Waits patiently

It's a bad move, no question. In the non-Retina MBPs at least you have the excuse of power consumption, but not shipping 7200RPM hard drives in a desktop is a crime. You know, of the first-world, not-technically-illegal variety.

For a work PC, my old Pentium4 3.4Ghz barely cut it, probably because the 2G RAM doesn't allow me to have much more open than Photoshop. My new QuadCore i7 3.5Ghz works amazing, with 8G RAM I can have all my programs open, batch processing folders while I'm finalizing a CD and maybe a video I was editing or files I was compressing.

For a gaming rig (Nvidia 7600GS vs 550GTX), I did FPS comparisons on the worst possible example: dual boxing a SingleCore CPU-heavy MMO, EverQuest 2. While the Pentium4 is still fast, it would pretty much lock up and spit out ~1-2 FPS on the lowest settings, but on the i7 can run from ~60-90 FPS on the highest settings. Now, the graphics card may have been part of the reason for that jump, if I enable one setting, "CPU Point Lights", it will drop down to ~10 FPS.

Even modern processors are lame, because the game designers took a risk assuming that clock speeds would increase (a gamble they lost), rather than expand as parallel chips at the same speed. So, while some people might not need the speed, if they can afford ~$700, it's worth it (unless you care that your chip comes stamped with Foxconn, then you can make other purchasing decisions to pretend like you care).

This whole article is pretty much useless because it doesn't really provide any explanation about what an i7 COULD possibly do better. For 99% of the stuff people do, it will make no difference.

But, how about of you do a lot of HD video editing and processing? AND, how about if you do a LOT of video encoding? Is there a significant difference that would make the i7 worthwhile???

"...your money is going to be best spent elsewhere unless you regularly do very CPU-heavy tasks like video editing and transcoding or very heavy Photoshop work, and the minutes and seconds you'll save with a marginally faster CPU are important to you."

Is that activity monitor image showing a dual core i7 (with hyperthreading), not a quad core? The reason I ask is that my i7 quad core only shows a single cpu on activity monitor. To see all cores I must use the floating cpu window and then I can see 8 cpus.

I would point out a few things that were trivialized in the article...

Cache is extremely important. The Celerons of old had none, and they were unbelievably slower than equivalent CPUs with cache. The same is true for HDDs. I ran extensive benchmarks on about 30 workstations trying to figure out why performance was so bad on certain systems. It turned out that the HDDs with less than 32MB cache were reducing write speeds by a significant amount. Always try to get 64MB of cache in HDDs.

Hyperthreading is kind of glossed over in the article, but it literally doubles the threads available. It won't be as big a boost as doubling the cores, but it is still significant.

RAID0 (or RAID5) can go a long way to improving HDD speed. I couldn't justify the 10x in price to get 1/2 the storage and 20x the performance of SSD when I could buy several HDDs and run them in RAID0 for a fraction of the cost with huge capacities and a marginal difference in performance.

As far as iMac pricing/performance, you are getting last gen performance in their top end 27" model for $2k. The equivalent PC with Windows and Office is about $500 less. If you pay $2k for a PC you can get one that nearly doubles all aspects with Windows and Office, a 32" 1080p monitor, tons of bells and whistles not even available, and the ability to double or triple the GPU performance with SLI and add a ton of drives in RAID0 in the future (iBuyPower.com). If you have more money to spend you can literally get 5-10x the GPU GLOPS and nearly 1TB of SSD in RAID0 with just two drives. It's silly to even compare them. As one Apple fanboy explained to me... "It's a lifestyle choice". In other words, not a rational one. lol

If it's a home system in which you're buying a mac and asking questions about hardware? You're already doing things wrong. Why spend $300 for a 256GB SSD when you can spend $150 for that same SSD if you don't get a mac?

the logic here appalls me.

So you sit in a BMW dealership

Apple is no BMW. Quit trying to make an overpriced PC into a surrogate for a car that everyone here knows you can't afford.

Which is why I have to ask... what the heck was the point of this article. You say it's about selecting a i5 or i7 and then spend the entire article talking about how Mac setups are weird and then tell people to overspend on bad upgrade decisions (at ridiculous Apple upgrade pricing).

I don't think it's the article that has problems but your logic and reading capability (probably influenced by bias). Take it easy, it's just a post that says that if you don't make heavy video or photo editing an ssd is a better upgrade than a i7, not everyone knows that, so it can be useful, just not to you.

That seems to be conventional wisdom these days but I am not sure I buy into it. I recently upgraded a PC for someone so that they could use Steam. Their built in Intel GPU wasn't supported. So I put in a trailing edge non-Intel GPU and the whole box perked up. Things you wouldn't necessarily expect to get faster did.

Most of this ends up boiling to motherboard support, in my experience. I see too many people pouncing on the best processor they can get, only to buy the cheapest motherboard they can find.

You can get an i7 to run on any motherboard that supports it, but if that motherboard does not support the features, the cache size, etc, then why spend the extra money?

I'm not talking DiYers only here. major manufacturers have been known to just "stick it in" and sell it, only to have a machine that can't use what you paid extra money to get. Unless you look at the whole package, i5 vs i7 is a moot point many a time.

If it's a home system in which you're buying a mac and asking questions about hardware? You're already doing things wrong. Why spend $300 for a 256GB SSD when you can spend $150 for that same SSD if you don't get a mac?

the logic here appalls me.

So you sit in a BMW dealership yelling at people trying to figure out which options to choose that they are doing it wrong and that they should get a Suzuki? Certainly an interesting way to spend your time, no offense. Unless, of course, you own a Suzuki dealership across the street. Then I totally understand.

Again with the car analogies! If you want to fix up that analogy, it would be more like sitting in a BMW dealership saying they are doing it wrong and they should get a Suzuki which is actually a BMW with similar specs at a lower price and but doesn't sport the BMW logo.

Just a few short years ago in gaming, the cpu was an afterthought. Now, it is integral.

As for the question of i5 versus i7, just ask yourself this question: Do I need the extra memory bandwidth? If you don't know the answer to that question you probably do not need an i7.

Most people would have no idea if they need 'axtra bandwidth' anymore than they'd know if a larger L3 or L2 cache is better for them. Almost all modern CPUs have more than enough grunt to do 99.99% of tasks; including the i3 and AMDs offerings. Unless you're doing heavy video editing, or CPU rendering, the difference between an i5 and i7 is minimal. The amount of RAM, the GPU and perhaps most importantly, an SSD make far more difference to the day to day user experience than the CPU.

In gaming, it's a little different, but even they're generally restricted to a low number of threads and of you're gaming at high resolution, or on a laptop, your GPU is always the bottleneck.

I got an i7, the 2.66ghz dual core MBP with an SSD. Some reviews I read (specifically the Anandtech one) said the i7 feels tangibly faster then the i5 and the benchmarks back this up. However, as a user, you'd only notice if you used them side by side. If you only ever experienced an i5, I doubt you'd feel yourself wanting for more power.

If it's a home system in which you're buying a mac and asking questions about hardware? You're already doing things wrong. Why spend $300 for a 256GB SSD when you can spend $150 for that same SSD if you don't get a mac?

the logic here appalls me.

So you sit in a BMW dealership yelling at people trying to figure out which options to choose that they are doing it wrong and that they should get a Suzuki? Certainly an interesting way to spend your time, no offense. Unless, of course, you own a Suzuki dealership across the street. Then I totally understand.

Except a better comparison is sitting at a Cadillac dealer complaining they're not buying a Chevy. Under the hood the two (both the cars and computers) are virtually identical.

I built a Sandy Bridge Core i5-2550k quad core desktop last year with 16 gb of ram. The thing is so fast that it can do anything I throw at it without a hiccup, That is, multiple VMs, photoshop, 3d rendering, audio editing, video editing and many media related activities. I chose not to fork over 200+ for an upgrade to an i7, and a really don't miss it. The only difference was a bit more of cache and 100 mhz. For me, the i5 was the sweet spot between price/performance. I know i7 would be a bit faster, but at this point I am certain I would not notice the difference.

Is that activity monitor image showing a dual core i7 (with hyperthreading), not a quad core? The reason I ask is that my i7 quad core only shows a single cpu on activity monitor. To see all cores I must use the floating cpu window and then I can see 8 cpus.

This article brings up something I've been wanting to see, a CPU comparison guide with a companion usage guide with categories such as Internet, word processing, multimedia, gaming etc., and a cpu list for each. Kind of like the system guides, but CPU only.

Ars did post something similar to that a couple months ago, although it was a repost and focused on gaming. It had really interesting information on the relative strengths of the various chips, with my general takeaway being that an i5 sounds about right for most anyone (desktop version of course).

Cache is extremely important. The Celerons of old had none, and they were unbelievably slower than equivalent CPUs with cache.

That was 15 years ago, these days it's not as big of a deal to go from 6MB to 8MB cache.

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Hyperthreading is kind of glossed over in the article, but it literally doubles the threads available. It won't be as big a boost as doubling the cores, but it is still significant.

It doubles the threads, but not the number that can actually be processed. Mostly it just prevents a CPU core from being idle until the OS scheduler can assign it a new thread. The real-world performance boost varied widely and is only about 5-20%.

Quote:

RAID0 (or RAID5) can go a long way to improving HDD speed. I couldn't justify the 10x in price to get 1/2 the storage and 20x the performance of SSD when I could buy several HDDs and run them in RAID0 for a fraction of the cost with huge capacities and a marginal difference in performance.

Not really. On top of significantly higher transfer speeds there are things like latency that an SSD simply makes go away. Not to mention RAID 0 is never a good idea for any use case.

This whole article is pretty much useless because it doesn't really provide any explanation about what an i7 COULD possibly do better. For 99% of the stuff people do, it will make no difference.

But, how about of you do a lot of HD video editing and processing? AND, how about if you do a LOT of video encoding? Is there a significant difference that would make the i7 worthwhile???

"...your money is going to be best spent elsewhere unless you regularly do very CPU-heavy tasks like video editing and transcoding or very heavy Photoshop work, and the minutes and seconds you'll save with a marginally faster CPU are important to you."

I do that kinds of stuff, but after a cost benefit analysis I couldn't justify paying half again more for maybe 10-15% of a performance increase.

My i5 spends 24/7 at 100% load grinding on boinc projects. For that situation, I was disappointed that the i5 didn't have hyper-threading. I felt it was a bit tacky for Intel to keep it off as a way to entice folks to bump up to the i7.

I built a Sandy Bridge Core i5-2550k quad core desktop last year with 16 gb of ram. The thing is so fast that it can do anything I throw at it without a hiccup, That is, multiple VMs, photoshop, 3d rendering, audio editing, video editing and many media related activities. I chose not to fork over 200+ for an upgrade to an i7, and a really don't miss it. The only difference was a bit more of cache and 100 mhz. For me, the i5 was the sweet spot between price/performance. I know i7 would be a bit faster, but at this point I am certain I would not notice the difference.

Ditto, although I got "stuck" with an i5-2400. CPU's have gotten to the point where they just chew through everything. Ok, sure, there's some heavy apps, like gaming, photoshop, but most folks just surfing the web and typing up papers ... it's like using a lightsaber to cut butter.

The biggest improvement was the bump to an SSD. Plopping money that could have gone towards an i7 into an SSD is by far a better investment.

Plus... cpu's still depreciate so fast. Today's awesome i7 is tomorrow's bargain bin as Intel puppy-mills out a new chip line. Sandy Bridge was so cool late last year. Then Ivy Bridge shows up ... meh. I still got a computer that will last me a good 5 years at this rate. No "iPad 3 remorse" here.

I'm in for a new iMac (my first Apple desktop actually) and I'm glad I found this article. I will definitely get the high end 27" for it's graphic card but now I know I can still save on the processor. I use my Mac for gaming in Bootcamp as well but it appears the i5 will suffice. Does anybody have benchmarks for Civilization 5? Does HT make any difference at all?

It's the same thing as why some old farts drive a 400HP V8 and are afraid to go over 50mph.

Americans in general buy things that are more than they really need.

You don't need to eat a super size burger, you don't need a 4000 sq ft home, and you don't need a SUV just to haul groceries.

Well, we've gotten into this habit of over-buying things for the wrong reason.

EG: as a motorcycle rider, I hear riders constantly say "I need more speed to help me get out of situations". The only "situations" I've ever gotten in were BECAUSE of speed. The brakes have saved my bacon more time than the accelerator has.

Others want to drive a big car, b/c if they get into an accident it's more protection around them. Others just want the horse-power-on-demand on the off chance that one time in their life it'll come in hand.

Folks buy big houses not really for the room, but for the neighborhood they're in. Part of buying a house is about finding a nice, secure neighborhood to live in where you don't feel like your neighbors are sizing you up as the next robbery victims.

It's a bit bizarre, b/c this mentality has actually created the very situations these folks are trying to protec themselves against. Folks drive a bigger car to protect themself, then another guy has to drive a BIGGER car to protect himself from them, then they get a BIGGER BIGGER car... ad nauseum. Folks buy a home in a nicer neighborhood, it costs more, drives up home prices, builders big more, bigger homes in nice neighborhoods...cost more ... ad nauseum. This just widens the gap between folks that have and don't have, and creates more of a "I need more protection/security/insurance!" mentality.